MUSIC REVIEW : Master Chorale, Sans Orchestra

It can be argued that only the truest devotee would choose to program a whole concert for unaccompanied voices.

But Paul Salamunovich, music director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, proved his conviction and much more Sunday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion when he led 60 members through an entire evening of a cappella classics. By its end, few could doubt his belief that the human voice is the most perfect and versatile of instruments.

Ever the connoisseur, Salamunovich put together an agenda that spanned four centuries--starting with Palestrina and including Bruckner, Schoenberg, Copland and Vaughan Williams.

It was a marvelous array of music and an ear-opener. Not just because the performance quantified and clarified every line and strand of sound the various scores could encompass but also because the distinctive style of the composers could be heard even apart from their usual symphonic setting.

The Vaughan Williams Mass, for example, gathered itself together at times for surges of quickened uplift and modal affirmation. Unfortunately, it went without inspiration for some stretches.

Not true for the other entries. Schoenberg’s “Friede auf Erden,” written in 1907, is for singers what “Verklarte Nacht” is for strings--its splintered harmonies yielding the composer’s last tonal cries. And the Chorale gave exultant voice to them.

So did mezzo-soprano Lesley Leighton offer a solid presence to Copland’s “In the Beginning.”

But it was in founder Roger Wagner’s arrangement of “Danny Boy”--the first stanza--that the sense of one voice, one breath, one mind resonated.